Tom Crowley Speaks at Maritime Trades Department (MTD) Conference

09/17/2013 10:00 am

Crowley's Chairman, President and CEO Tom Crowley recently spoke at the Maritime Trades Department (MTD), AFL-CIO convention, held last week in L.A.

During his speech, which touched on topics such as safety and wellness, he remarked, “I think the partnership that industry and labor and government have is really unique to our industry. We can’t take all this for granted. We have to continue to work on it – make it more powerful and really invest in the future.”

Pointing to the company’s sterling record, he added: “These results never would have happened if it hadn’t been for our partnership with labor on achieving these goals. “Most of our employees will enter their career and leave their career and not have any incidents, not hurt themselves, not hurt any equipment and not hurt the environment. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we give our employees all the tools we can to make sure that all of them have that opportunity. And when you look at it that way, it’s a much simpler task, a much easier task. We’re not going to get rid of all hazards, but if you layer in defenses and give the people that are doing the work as many defenses as you can, it’s going to stop that chain of events. Whenever you look at a (minor) safety incident or a disaster, it’s always a multitude of things that add up that create the problem. And we’ve got to tackle each one of those and make sure that we take as many of those away so we can avert those incidents.”

On wellness, he said, “We’ve taken [wellness] on as a big challenge within our company, and again, this is an area we’re going to look for partnerships with our unions to figure out how to tackle it. This is a challenge we all face; we face it as a nation, we face it as a company, and you face it as unions providing those medical plans. We’ve got to become a healthier workforce, a healthier America.”

Finally, he added, "We’re here to serve this country in as many ways as we can. And the amount of work we do with the government is huge, but we want to do more, want to be of service, want to be able to lower their costs of doing business by leveraging what the industrial commercial sectors can provide.”